Generating a broadly protective influenza vaccine is critical to global health. Understanding how immune memory influences influenza immunity is central to this goal. We undertook an in-depth study of the B cell response to the pandemic 2009 H1N1 vaccine over consecutive years. Analysis of monoclonal Abs generated from vaccine-induced plasmablasts demonstrated that individuals with low preexisting serological titers to the vaccinating strain generated a broadly reactive, HA stalk-biased, response. Higher preexisting serum antibody levels correlated with a strain-specific HA head-dominated response. We demonstrate that this HA head immunodominance encompasses poor accessibility of the HA stalk epitopes. Further, we show polyreactivity of HA stalk-reactive antibodies that could cause counterselection of these cells. Thus, preexisting memory against HA head epitopes predominate, inhibiting a broadly protective response against the HA stalk upon revaccination with similar strains. Consideration of influenza exposure history is critical for new vaccine strategies designed to elicit broadly neutralizing antibodies.

SUMMARY Pathogenic H7N9 avian influenza viruses continue to represent a public health concern and several candidate vaccines are currently being developed. It is vital to assess if protective antibodies are induced following vaccination, and to characterize the diversity of epitopes targeted. Here we characterized the binding and functional properties of twelve H7-reactive human antibodies induced by a candidate A/Anhui/1/2013 (H7N9) vaccine. Both neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies protected mice in vivo during passive transfer challenge experiments. Mapping the H7 hemagglutinin antigenic sites by generating escape mutant variants against the neutralizing antibodies identified unique epitopes on the head and stalk domains. Further, the broadly cross-reactive non-neutralizing antibodies generated in this study were protective through Fc-mediated effector cell recruitment. These findings reveal important properties of vaccine-induced antibodies and provide a better understanding of the human monoclonal antibody response to influenza in the context of vaccines.

An optimal HIV vaccine should induce broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) that neutralize diverse viral strains and subtypes. However, potent bnAbs develop in only a small fraction of HIV-infected individuals, all contain rare features such as extensive mutation, insertions, deletions, and/or long complementarity-determining regions, and some are polyreactive, casting doubt on whether bnAbs to HIV can be reliably induced by vaccination. We engineered two potent VRC01-class bnAbs that minimized rare features. According to a quantitative features frequency analysis, the set of features for one of these minimally mutated bnAbs compared favorably with all 68 HIV bnAbs analyzed and was similar to antibodies elicited by common vaccines. This same minimally mutated bnAb lacked polyreactivity in four different assays. We then divided the minimal mutations into spatial clusters and dissected the epitope components interacting with those clusters, by mutational and crystallographic analyses coupled with neutralization assays. Finally, by synthesizing available data, we developed a working-concept boosting strategy to select the mutation clusters in a logical order following a germline-targeting prime. We have thus developed potent HIV bnAbs that may be more tractable vaccine goals compared to existing bnAbs, and we have proposed a strategy to elicit them. This reductionist approach to vaccine design, guided by antibody and antigen structure, could be applied to design candidate vaccines for other HIV bnAbs or protective Abs against other pathogens.

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Coeliac disease (CD), an enteropathy caused by cereal gluten ingestion, is characterized by CD4+ T cells recognizing deamidated gluten and by antibodies reactive to gluten or the self-antigen transglutaminase 2 (TG2). TG2-specific immunoglobulin A (IgA) of plasma cells (PCs) from CD lesions have limited somatic hypermutation (SHM). Here we report that gluten-specific IgA of lesion-resident PCs share this feature. Monoclonal antibodies were expression cloned from single PCs of patients either isolated from cultures with reactivity to complex deamidated gluten antigen or by sorting with gluten peptide tetramers. Typically, the antibodies bind gluten peptides related to T-cell epitopes and many have higher reactivity to deamidated peptides. There is restricted VH and VL combination and usage among the antibodies. Limited SHM suggests that a common factor governs the mutation level in PCs producing TG2- and gluten-specific IgA. The antibodies have potential use for diagnosis of CD and for detection of gluten.